The tiny Finborough theatre near Earls Court is currently presenting a theatrical rarity. They call it Country Magic, and it is an adaptation of Pinero’s 1922 play about damaged men returning from the War, The Enchanted Cottage.
The central character is maimed and scarred John Bashforth, suffering from vicious headaches and corrosive self-pity. He has rented [...]
April 26, 2009 – 11:00 am
Songs of War was a concert organised by the War Poets Association (together with societies remembering particular poets) in St James’s Church, Piccadilly yesterday evening. St James’s is a building of dignified elegance, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and located about half-way between Piccadilly Circus and Fortnum and Mason. It’s the church where Robert Graves [...]
I’m editing my thesis into a final version now, expanding bits that need it, and cutting out parts that don’t further the main argument. One bit that I’ve cut rather regretfully is an account of a very poor story indeed. It’s typical of the way that wartime stories battened on to religious ideas, but isn’t [...]
In the anonymous Billet Notes in Nash’s Magazine, 1916, two lines of verse are quoted. The context is a discussion of journalistic exaggeration and fakery:
I am rather fed up with this Angels of Mons business, which the cheap papers are exploiting. It’s too much like the bathos they indulged in during the early stages of [...]
If I started a new Ph.D. now, what topic would I choose?
I’d be tempted by the subject of fakes, especially atrocity story fakes, holocaust fakes, misery memoir fakes and so on.
In September 1914 a news article in The Times reproduced a letter, supposedly from the officer son of a London vicar. Here’s a typical extract:
Another [...]
April 16, 2009 – 10:13 am
A sentence from Storm Jameson’s autobiography, describing Bennett and Macaulay at a literary party:
On Thursday evening I watched her with Arnold Bennett. He hung over her, mouth slightly open, like a great fish mesmerized by the flickering tongue of a water-snake.
Another thing about Not So Quiet… When is it supposed to be happening?
The book ends in 1918, and while the time-scale is vague, the action of the story doesn’t seem to have covered more than a year or so. The mood of the book certainly fits the later years of the War better, when the [...]
“Not So Quiet… by “Helen Zenna Smith” (Evadne Price) has attained a big reputation since its reprinting twenty-odd years ago, mostly, I think, because it is the kind of book that many wish wartime women had written, with its frankness about the physical (almost as many references to lavatories as All Quiet), its explicitness about [...]
The Saturday Westminster Gazette (Sep 19, 1914) text of Arnold Bennett’s The White Feather is more or less the same as that published in the American Collier’s a month later, but there is one puzzle.
The unpleasant young lady who hands the hero a feather at the end of the tale says (in the Westminster):
“That’s all [...]
Being in the area, I popped in to see the Northern branch of the Imperial War Museum today. It’s on the edge of an industrial estate, quite near Old Trafford, and the building is spectacular. It’s designed by Daniel Liebeskind, an architectural rule-breaker, and the idea is that it represents an exploded world, with the [...]
